Launch Your Brand Successfully With These 4 Optimization Tactics

Do you have a new brand ready for the marketplace? Launching your brand is an exciting time, but in order to have launch success, you’ll need to leverage a few key optimization tactics. Optimization can increase your brand’s online visibility in Google SERPs and extend your audience reach.

By Michael Zhou

This all may sound a bit challenging, but it really isn’t once you begin your optimization efforts. To help you in having a successful brand launch, here are the top four tactics to employ.

Think Mobile Users

One of the most important tactics you can employ for a successful brand launch is mobile optimization. In 2015, Google announced that mobile searches surpassed desktop searches in 10 countries. This makes optimizing for mobile important if you want to reach more potential customers.

Another caveat to mobile optimization is Google’s mobile-first index, officially rolled out this year. “Today we’re announcing that after a year and a half of careful experimentation and testing, we’ve started migrating sites that follow the best practices for mobile-first indexing,” Google announced in March.

What does migrating mean? It may be no surprise to see mobile-friendly websites get a boost in Google ranking for searches on mobile devices.

How do you optimize for mobile? First, check just how mobile-friendly your website is using the Google Mobile-Friendly Test. This test will give you insight into how fast your site loads on mobile, as well as other important fixes you may need to make.

Provide Simple Site Navigation

You may have heard the term, “user experience” lately. This has become a hot topic in the optimization space among SEOs, marketers, PR pros, and website designers and developers. This makes user experience a top priority for a successful brand launch.

One very important part of providing a powerful user experience to your audience is site navigation. This means having a clean, uncluttered website that leads users on a very specific brand journey. For example, having clear calls to action with easy to find information about your brand, products, and/or services.

“When people land on your website, make it easy for them to do what you want them to do. For example, we want our website visitors to get connected with trusted local marine professionals. So, the first option we give them when they land on our website is to search for pros in their local market.”Mike Kiel, Founder and CEO of BoatPlanet explained.

Make Local SEO A Priority

If your business has a local presence somewhere, leverage local SEO to help increase your online visibility. This is especially helpful for increasing visibility in Google SERPs. Ever see those knowledge boxes to the right of search results after performing a Google search?

Local SEO is essential, because if your audience is performing a search, local results will normally pop up first. This is part of Google’s attempt to improve and meet searcher intent.

How do you get local SEO right? The first step is to ensure your brand’s contact information, like phone number, address, support email, is on your website. The next step is to ensure you are using your location keyword in your site’s content.

For example, let’s say you are a boat manufacturer in Maryland. It would be beneficial when optimizing for local SEO to have “Maryland” in your website content, preferably in an H1, H2, and paragraph tag. Once your site is optimized for local search, let Google My Business know about it.

Optimize Your Brand Off-Page

Not all optimization tactics are done on-page within your brand’s website. There are a number of optimization tactics you can employ off-page as well. For instance, don’t count out the traditional press release. Press releases still have value and powerful reach when done right, attracting new customers to your brand.

Press releases can also be about anything. You should most certainly launch a press release announcing your brand’s inception. You can also launch press releases about your products, services, community outreach, partnerships, and more.

Another off-page optimization tactic is connecting with other like-minded brands in your industry. Outreach is powerful and you can share a little online real estate with partners by promoting products together, or being listed as a resource on each other’s sites.

This also helps build your backlink portfolio, a very powerful ranking factor in the eyes of Google, thus improving your online visibility even more.

Wrapping Up . . .

Taking a few optimization steps is important to having a successful brand launch. From mobile optimization to employing traditional off-page PR, there’s a wide range of tactics you can employ with a little bit of effort.

The most important factor is to ensure you have everything in place before launch. This will put your brand’s best foot forward from the get go. What optimization tactic was your most successful asset? We want to hear about it.

Michael Zhou is a Senior VP of Business Intelligence Development and has assisted the Fortune 1000 company with expertise in the web as a whole, including ground-zero marketing efforts that benefit both consumer and vendor. He is also contributor on Esprittoday.

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